Brian Rotman is interested in cultural studies of mathematics, particularly in how signs (linguistic, pictorial, symbolic, gestural) achieve their discursive effects and how mathematical inscriptional practices facilitate and alter human consciousness.

He is the author of several books, including Signifying Nothing: the Semiotics of Zero (UK: Macmillan, 1987; 1993), Ad Infinitum...the Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In (Stanford University Press, 1998), and Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Stanford University Press, 2000).